A collection of sloppy snippets for scientific computing and data visualization in Python.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Weighted random choice

Weighted random choice makes you able to select a random value out of a set of values using a distribution specified though a set of weights. So, given a list we want to pick randomly some elements from it but we need that the chances to pick a specific element is defined using a weight. In the following code we have a function that implements the weighted random choice mechanism and an example of how to use it: